A Curious Mind (30 page)

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A Beautiful Mind

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Made in America

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24

Parenthood

Introduction:
A Curious Mind and a Curious Book

1
. Letter from Albert Einstein to his biographer Carl Seelig, March 11, 1952, cited in Alice Calaprice, ed.,
The Expanded Quotable Einstein
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

Chapter 1:
There Is No Cure for Curiosity

1
. This quote—perhaps the most razor-sharp take on curiosity's power—is widely attributed to the writer and poet Dorothy Parker, but no scholarly or online source has a citation for when Parker might have written or said it. The quote is also occasionally attributed to someone named Ellen Parr, but also without attribution, or any identifying information about Parr. The pair of lines do have the particular interlocking snap that is characteristic of Parker's turn of phrase.

2
. For those younger than thirty, phone companies used to offer a remarkable service. If you needed a phone number, you simply dialed 4-1-1 on your telephone and an operator would look it up for you. The address too.

3
. Forty years later, that is still the main phone number at Warner Bros., although now you also have to dial the area code: (818) 954-6000.

4
. What kind of character was Sue Mengers? Pretty big, pretty fearsome. The 2013 Broadway play about Mengers's life was called
I'll Eat You Last
.

5
. Google reports that the average number of searches per day in 2013 was
5,922,000,000. That's 4,112,500 each minute.
www.statisticbrain.com/google-searches/
, accessed October 10, 2014.

6
. In the CBS TV series
Dallas
, the question of “Who shot J.R.?” became one of the most effective cliffhangers in modern storytelling—a masterful campaign in creating curiosity. The actor Larry Hagman, who played J.R. Ewing in the TV show, was shot in the concluding episode of the 1979–80 season, which aired March 21, 1980. The character who shot him was not revealed until an episode broadcast eight months later, on November 21, 1980.

Marketing—and curiosity—around the cliffhanger was so widespread that bookies laid odds and took bets on who the shooter would turn out to be, and “Who shot J.R.?” jokes even crept into the 1980 presidential campaign between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. The Republican campaign produced buttons reading, “The Democrats shot J.R.”; President Carter joked that he would have no trouble with fund-raising if he could find out who had shot J.R.

CBS filmed five scenes, each with a different character shooting J.R. On the November 21 episode, the shooter was revealed to be Kristen Shepard, J.R.'s mistress (
content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,924376,00.html#paid-wall
, accessed October 10, 2014).

If you're curious, the largest Powerball jackpot—the jackpot from the forty-five-state lottery in the U.S.—was $590.5 million, won on May 18, 2013, by a single-ticket holder, Gloria C. MacKenzie, eighty-four, with a ticket purchased at a Publix supermarket in Zephyrhills, Florida (
www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/06/05/189018342/84-year-old-woman-claims-powerball-jackpot
, accessed October 10, 2014).

7
. Adults tend not to know the answer to “Why is the sky blue?” because although it's a simple question, and a simple experience, the answer itself is complicated. The sky is blue because of how light itself is made up.

Blue wavelengths of light are more easily scattered by the particles in the air than other colors, and so as sunlight streams from the sun to the ground, the blue light passing through the atmosphere gets scattered around, and we see that scattering as the sky being blue.

The blue color fades as you get higher up in the atmosphere. In a passenger jet, flying at six miles up (32,000 feet), the blue is already a little watery and thin. If you look up as you fly higher, the sky starts to look black—the black of space.

And the sky doesn't look blue when there is no light shining through it, of course. The blue goes away when the sun sets.

8
. Genesis, 2:16–17. The citation is from the New International Version of the Bible,
www.biblegateway.com
, accessed October 18, 2014.

9
. Genesis, 3:4–5. NIV.

10
. Genesis, 3:6. NIV.

11
. Genesis, 3:7. NIV.

12
. It's an astonishing output by a studio, in terms of lasting cultural impact and quality in a short time. The movies by year:

A Clockwork Orange
, 1971 (four Academy Award nominations)

Dirty Harry
, 1971

Deliverance
, 1972 (three Academy Award nominations)

The Exorcist
, 1973 (two Academy Awards, ten nominations)

Blazing Saddles
, 1974 (three Academy Award nominations)

The Towering Inferno
, 1974 (three Academy Awards, eight nominations)

Dog Day Afternoon
, 1975 (one Academy Award, six nominations)

All the President's Men
, 1976 (four Academy Awards, eight nominations)

13
. “A Strong Debut Helps, As a New Chief Tackles Sony's Movie Problems,” Geraldine Fabrikant,
New York Times
, May 26, 1997.

14
. When John Calley died in 2011, the
Los Angeles Times
used a picture of him sitting on a couch, one foot propped up on a coffee table (
www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/movies/la-me-2011notables-calley,0,403960.photo#axzz2qUMEKSCu
, accessed October 10, 2014).

15
. My office at Imagine Entertainment does have a desk, but I don't sit there very often. I have two couches, and that's where I work, notes spread out on the couch cushions or the coffee table, a console phone sitting on the cushion next to me.

16
. Stop and think about yourself for a minute. Regardless of what work you
do—whether you work in movies or software, insurance or health care or advertising—imagine if you decided today that for the next six months you would meet a new person
every single day
in your industry. Not to have an hour-long conversation, just to meet them and talk for five minutes. Six months from now, you'd know one hundred fifty people in your own line of work you don't know right now. If even 10 percent of those people had something to offer—insight, connections, support for a project—that's fifteen new allies.

17
. The piece ran in the
New Yorker
's “Talk of the Town” section: “Want Ad: Beautiful Minds,” by Lizzie Widdicombe, March 20, 2008.

18
. According to the
Forbes
magazine list of the richest people in the world, Carlos Slim was number one when I met him, and as of the end of 2014, he was also number one. But the top three—Slim, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and investor Warren Buffett—shift around depending on the movement of the stock market.

Chapter 2:
The Police Chief, the Movie Mogul, and the Father of the H-Bomb: Thinking Like Other People

1
. The full line from Vladimir Nabokov is: “Curiosity in its turn is insubordination in its purest form.” It comes from the 1947 novel
Bend Sinister
(New York: Vintage Classic Paperback, 2012), 46.

2
. President Bush used the speech to denounce the rioting, which he said “is not about civil rights” and “not a message of protest” but “the brutality of a mob, pure and simple.” But he also said of the beating of Rodney King: “What you saw and what I saw on the TV video was revolting. I felt anger. I felt pain. How can I explain this to my grandchildren?” The text of Bush's May 1, 1992, speech is here:
www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=20910
, accessed October 10, 2014.

3
. In the wake of the Rodney King beating—before the officers were tried—there was an investigative commission into the practices of the Los Angeles Police Department, and into Gates's leadership, and Gates announced in the summer of 1991 that he would resign. He then postponed his
retirement several times—and even threatened to postpone leaving after his successor, Willie Williams, the chief in Philadelphia, was hired.

Here are several accounts of Gates's reluctant departure:

Robert Reinhold, “Head of Police in Philadelphia Chosen for Chief in Los Angeles,”
New York Times
, April 16, 1992,
www.nytimes.com/1992/04/16/us/head-of-police-in-philadelphia-chosen-for-chief-in-los-angeles.html
, accessed October 10, 2014.

Richard A. Serrano and James Rainey, “Gates Says He Bluffed Staying, Lashes Critics,”
Los Angeles Times
, June 9, 1992,
articles.latimes.com/1992-06-09/news/mn-188_1_police-department, accessed October 10, 2014
.

Richard A. Serrano, “Williams Takes Oath as New Police Chief,”
Los Angeles Times
, June 27, 1992,
articles.latimes.com/1992-06-27/news/mn-828_1_police-commission
, accessed October 10, 2014.

4
. Daryl Gates was a protégé of William H. Parker, the man for whom the old LAPD headquarters, Parker Center, was named. Early in his career, as a young patrol officer, Gates was assigned to be Chief Parker's driver, a job in which Gates got to see up close the everyday acquisition and use of authority. Later, Gates was Parker's executive officer. Parker was the longest-serving LAPD chief, at sixteen years (1950 to 1966); Gates is the second-longest-serving chief, at fourteen years.

5
. Novelists and painters can rework the same topics, characters, and themes over and over again—many popular book series involve the same characters in very similar plots. Actors, directors, and others in Hollywood are supposed to avoid doing that, for fear of being typecast, or “falling into a rut.”

6
. I talked to Michael Scheuer just after he left the CIA in 2004, when his book
Imperial Hubris,
about being a front-line operative, came out. For an account of Scheuer's increasingly extreme views since then, read David Frum, in the
Daily Beast
, January 3, 2014: “Michael Scheuer's Meltdown,”
www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/03/michael-scheuer-s-meltdown.html
, accessed October 10, 2014.

7
. This list comes
from the
New York Times
obituary of Lew Wasserman, who died June 3, 2002. “Lew Wasserman, 89, is Dead; Last of Hollywood's Moguls,” by Jonathan Kandell,
New York Times
, June 4, 2002.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/04/business/lew-wasserman-89-is-dead-last-of-hollywood-s-moguls.html
, accessed October 10, 2014.

8
. People have been trying to eat and drink in cars since roads were smoothed out, but the search for a way of securing drinks inside cars really took off during the 1950s, with the invention of the drive-in hamburger stand. For a brief, charming history of the cup holder, see Sam Dean, “The History of the Car Cup Holder,”
Bon Appétit
, February 18, 2013,
www.bonappetit.com/trends/article/the-history-of-the-car-cup-holder
, accessed October 10, 2014.

9
. “Turning an Icon on Its Head,”
Chief Executive
, July 2003, chiefexecutive.net/turning-an-icon-on-its-head, accessed October 10, 2014. The story of Paul Brown imagining himself as liquid silicone is found in this second account of the invention of the upside-down bottle—the valve was first used in shampoo bottles: Frank Greve, “Ketchup Squeezes Competition with Upside-Down, Bigger Bottle,” McClatchey Newspapers, June 25, 2007,
www.mcclatchydc.com/2007/06/28/17335/ketchup-is-better-with-upside.html
, accessed October 10, 2014.

10
. Bruce Brown and Scott D. Anthony, “How P&G Tripled Its Innovation Success Rate,”
Harvard Business Review,
June 2011 (PDF file),
www.hbsclubwdc.net/images.html?file_id=xtypsHwtheU%3D
, accessed October 10, 2014.

11
. Sam Walton tells the story of creating Wal-Mart, and refining his business practices and his curiosity, in his autobiography,
Made in America
(New York: Bantam Books, 1993, with John Huey). Walton's curiosity was legendary. One fellow retail executive recalls meeting Walton and said, “He proceed[ed] to extract every piece of information in your possession” (p. 105).